Nothing matters as much as that, I told myself. Nothing.
Chapter 9 
I dreamed I held a bow made of fire. I dreamed I drew back the bowstring and released an arrow.
Flames leaped from the string, catching my skin, my hair. Fire roared through me. I knew then that I was the bow, the string, the arrow. Fire consumed me as I flew through the air. So much fire—but I also knew better than to scream—
I woke with a gasp, drenched in sweat. The air was calm, the storm gone. I heard water lapping at sand and saw the overhang above me.
I didn’t remember falling asleep. Ari’s leather jacket was draped over me; he lay curled by my side, shivering in his Star Wars T-shirt. In the thin light, his hair and face both seemed very pale. Svan was nowhere in sight.
Ari muttered something about ravens and dawn’s light in his sleep. It sort of rhymed and sort of didn’t. I sat up and moved to drape the jacket over him. I still couldn’t feel the cold.
Ari jerked awake, looked up at me, and frowned. “Don’t do this,” he said.
I didn’t have to ask what he meant. “Hallgerd killed her. I can’t just let her get away with that.”
“Hallgerd’s been dead a thousand years. For all that time, everyone’s remembered how horrible she was. Isn’t that punishment enough?”
“No.” Nowhere near enough. And she wasn’t dead for me, not when I’d only just spoken with her.
Svan’s fire had died to embers. The sky beyond the overhang was gray with patches of blue shining through. A few yards away, across the road, I saw black sand and a gray bay. A bit of sun reflected off Ari’s pale hair. I wanted to draw him close, to warm his bare arms.
But I had my memories now. I knew who the dark-haired boy in the photo was. Jared and I had only started dating in the middle of the past year, but even before then, he was my best friend. He went to every one of my track meets. I went to all of his soccer games. He’d been there for me when I got the phone call about Mom. He’d always been there, whenever I’d needed him.
Until I decided to go to Iceland to find my mother, instead of following him to study wildlife biology in San Diego. Jared and San Diego both seemed very far away now.
Even so, I wasn’t Dad. I wasn’t about to let Jared find out I’d gone away and forgotten him. I handed Ari his jacket. “Here. It’s cold.” Hadn’t he almost frozen to death once already?
“I live here. I’m used to the cold.” Ari drew the jacket on and looked at me. The red welts on his palms had mostly faded.
“Where’s Svan?” I asked.
“He went to gather some things. For the spell, he said. We could leave now. If we get a head start, maybe he won’t catch up—”
“No.”
“Haley—”
I left the overhang and walked across the road. Ari followed me. The puddles were beginning to ice over, and their thin crusts crunched beneath my feet. That made no sense—it’d been summer when we left Thingvellir. Not that I could even feel the cold. I unzipped my jacket; the wind brushed my ears and bare neck. “Ari, where are we?”
Ari shrugged uneasily. “I’m not sure. Somewhere in Iceland, I think.”
I glanced at the hills with their red and orange mosses. Autumn colors, though we didn’t get them in Tucson. “How long have we been gone?”
“I don’t know.” Wind tugged at Ari’s hair. “If we’re lucky three, maybe four months?”
From above the hills the sun cast long shadows toward the bay. In Iceland the sun didn’t set in summer, either, not for long. “And if we’re not lucky?”
Ari jammed his hands into his pockets. “I’ve been trying not to think about that.”
Thorvald has been dead many years. Warm as I was, I shivered. Muninn said time was fluid in his cave. What did that mean? How long had Dad been waiting for me? I scowled and dug my sneaker into the sand. Dad could wait forever, for all that I cared.
A gull flew low over the water. Behind it I saw two smaller birds, white-and-black arctic terns. If it wasn’t summer, shouldn’t they have migrated south? All three birds quickly flew on. “Do you know that ever since I met Hallgerd, all I dream about is fire?” I looked at the water, not Ari, as I spoke. “And about going up in flames?”
“So you want to cast a spell that could speed things along? No offense, Haley, but that doesn’t seem very smart.”
The worst part of the dream hadn’t been the burning, though. It had been knowing that when I fell to earth, the world would burn with me. Svan’s spell might take care of Hallgerd’s fire, but what about mine?
Ari shook his hair out of his eyes. “We could bring the coin to Hlidarendi with my mom, like she wanted. We don’t have to destroy it.”
“No!” My voice came out too loud. I didn’t want to even look at Katrin again.
“Haley. I’m angry with them, too, and believe me, I know all about doing stupid things because you’re angry. But this—”
“You were right to tell me about my dad and your mom. That wasn’t stupid.”
“Oh yeah, because if I hadn’t told you, you might never have run and climbed the rocks and fallen. I was so right to make that happen. To get us into this mess.”
“You didn’t make this mess. She did.” Not Katrin. Hallgerd. Ari’s mom and my dad had made it worse, though.
Ari kicked the damp sand. “I’d just like to see us both get out of it alive. Call me selfish, but I’d rather not have to explain to your father that Hallgerd’s spell consumed you, too.”
“About time this spell hurt someone besides me.”
“Haley!” Ari’s jaw fell open. It was several heartbeats before he spoke. “You don’t mean that.”
My stomach clenched. Why did I still care how Dad felt?
“Your dad was a wreck when your mom disappeared. You know that, don’t you?”
The awful thing was, I did know. I’d seen how lost Dad looked when he came off that plane last summer—how lost he’d looked all this past year. “Why’d he mess around, then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why the hell did he talk about getting a divorce?”
“I don’t know. Maybe your dad and my mom both just screwed up. Maybe that’s how people are.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“I know.” Ari reached for my hand. I drew mine away. He muttered something that might have been “sorry”—about Dad or about holding my hand, I couldn’t tell. “Svan’s part of the same saga as Hallgerd, you know. We study Njal’s Saga next year in school, but of course Mom made me read it early. The sorcerer caused all sorts of trouble. It’s not like he can be trusted.”
As if I didn’t know that. Ari wasn’t the one Svan had tried to claim as a gift. The sun touched the hills behind us, turning the mosses to gold. Ari drew his arms around himself—was the air getting colder? In the distance, I saw Svan heading toward us along the beach, his staff in one hand, a second, smaller leather bag slung over his shoulder atop the first one. He whistled as he walked.
“Well. You two took your time waking up,” the sorcerer said as he drew near. The smaller sack was wriggling. What on earth?
“For the spell,” Svan said at my puzzled look.
“What do you mean, for the spell?” From inside the bag I heard a squeal.
Svan stared at me like I was a puzzle he was trying to figure out. “Does my kinswoman truly know so little of sorcery? We must go through all the steps of Hallgerd’s spell if we wish to break it, only differently. And if Hallgerd used the spell that I believe she did, it required the blood of a white fox.”